"We'll all keep getting younger and younger until we suffer a fate worse than death: Pre-life ... then death.'"
— Professor Farnsworth, Futurama
The Fountain of Youth seems an attractive idea, especially for the elderly; you get to wind back the clock and prolong your life. However much like a drug, it can come with dangers if overdosed. If it has a continuous effect, the youth could make someone so young they regress to before they were born, becoming a fetus exposed to the world and at severe risk of dying. Or worse, regressing beyond that to the point that they don't even exist!
Maybe it's because someone spent too much time in the Fountain of Youth, causing it to go horribly right. Or the youth continues to decrease someone's age even outside of it. If someone suffers from Merlin Sickness, this might be how it ultimately kills them. Could be considered a form of Harmful Healing, with the "healing" part being healing away age.
When someone's birth is literally undone instead of reverting before it, it's a Ret-Gone situation. Contrast Rapid Aging, where someone rapidly ages and can be at risk of becoming too old to live rather than too young, or No Immortal Inertia, where someone reverts to their true ancient age and dies because of it. This might be part of what makes the Devolution Device so dangerous, though it usually "just" sending someone back down the Evolutionary Levels.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Darker than Black: Amber's Time Master powers come at the expense of making her younger with each use. In the finale, she makes a Heroic Sacrifice to send Hei back in time to save the Contractors, leaving only her clothes behind.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders: Alessi's Stand Sethan is a shadow that de-ages whoever's in it within mere seconds. A woman unfortunate enough to spend too long under the shadow is reduced to a fetus, which the already made younger Polneraff uses a blanket in a desperate attempt to keep her alive. Fortunately she survives and goes back to her natural age with no ill effects.
- My Hero Academia: Eri has the Quirk "Rewind", a Devolution Device that allows her to rewind living beings to a previous state. Unfortunately, she is unable to control it, putting her at risk of rewinding someone to the point of non-existence. Her Traumatic Superpower Awakening saw her accidentally erase her own father.
Film
- The Poof Point
: This is the central plot, where two kids are fighting to figure out what went wrong with their parents' invention while said parents mentally regress from middle age into infancy, knowing that their parents' previous experiments all went "poof" the second they had no further left to mentally regress.
Literature
- Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator: Willy Wonka has managed to develop Wonka-Vite pills, which decrease someone's age by 20 years exactly. The elderly characters take four, despite some of them barely being in their eighties. One is younger than eighty, causing their age to be in minus years which leads them to become strange negative ghosts who are at risk being the prey of Gnoolies.
- Frank R. Stockton's The Queen's Museum and Other Fanciful Tales, short story "Old Pipes and the Dryad". When a dryad kisses a human being, the person's age is reduced by ten years. People who live in an area where dryads are found are careful to not allow children of ten years or less to wander freely. If a child that young is kissed by a dryad, they will be made so young that they will cease to exist.
Live-Action TV
- The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: "One of Our Spies Is Missing" involves a biochemist who has discovered the secret of restoring youth, which he uses to restore a retired famous statesman Sir Norman Swickert back to vitality to carry on his career. However, the process puts a considerable strain on the body, with him warning if used to much the machine will "turn you into a boy, a dead boy." He later uses the same process to commit suicide rather than risk his technology being controlled by THRUSH.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Too Short A Season" features the famous, elderly admiral Jameson having discovered a drug on Cerberus II which can restore youth but carries a high mortality rate at the best of times. Despite initially planning to slowly take it with his wife, upon Karnas, an opponent of his from decades previous, organising a hostage situation and demanding to speak to him. Jameson takes both doses so he'll be young enough to face him. The effect causes him to de-age younger than the point he met Karnas, with the strain of the changes killing him shortly afterwards.
Tabletop Games
- Call of Cthulhu supplement Curse of the Chthonians, adventure "The Curse of Chaugnar Faugn". The Time/Space Machine is able to de-age an object or creature, moving it back in time and making it younger. If a creature is moved back to before it was born, it will cease to exist.
Video Games
- Sam & Max: Freelance Police: In the episode "Moai Better Blues", Sam & Max encounter various people who had gone missing years ago that have turned into babies from drinking the fountain of youth. Among them is Jimmy Hoffa, who blocks the way into a cave the need to access. In order to get rid of him, Sam & Max have to trick him into drinking more of the fountain of youth, causing him to vanish.
Web Animation
- Dorkly Originals: The Most Horrifying Finish Move in Mortal Kombat has Sonya mess up the "Babality" on Sub-Zero, turning him into a fetus which promptly dies because of it. Everyone who sees it is disgusted, even Scorpion and Shang Tsung.
Western Animation
- The Delightful Children from Down the Lane in Codename: Kids Next Door threaten to do this by setting the dial on their age-changing ray to "age 0", saying it will make the Kids Next Door vanish forever when they use it on them. They never actually get the chance to try it though.
- Family Guy: In "Yug Ylimaf", Brian's screwing with Stewie's time machine causes the time to run backward and at an accelerated state. Stewie becomes panicked when he starts to revert in development, and the two are in a race against time to set things back to the normal before Stewie is returned to the womb and gets unmade.
- Futurama: In "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", the crew visits a Neptunian spa so the rejuvenation tar can make Professor Farnsworth less of an obnoxious old man. They end up getting in the tar and turning into teenagers(Farnsworth becomes middle-aged). He attempts to cure them of the tar with bacteria(except Leela who chooses to stay a teen)-not only do they become even younger but the bacteria mutates and causes them to become progressively younger. The crew is in a rush to get to the Fountain of Aging before they regress to pre-life, then death and non-existence.
- The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: "The Halls of Time" has the crew visiting a realm where the hourglasses of people's lifespan is kept. Billy ends up putting his, Irwin and Mandy's hourglasses upside down, causing them to de-age. They become progressively younger until they're reduced to fetuses, and Grim chooses not to turn their hourglasses back to normal so they can cease to exist. Thinking he has the last laugh, Grim learns that Billy put his hourglasses upside down. He's unable to lift his huge hourglass by the time he reaches it, and de-ages out of existence at the end of the episode.
- My Life as a Teenage Robot: Due to complications involving Time Dilation in "Good Old Sheldon", Sheldon ends up becoming an old man. Dr Wakeman manages to create a de-aging mechanism based on Jenny's movements, however, she's still fighting once he gets back to his normal age. By the time he's an infant, Dr Wakeman warns Jenny not to make any movements lest Sheldon be reduced to a zygote, and has to age another 15 years to get back to normal.
- In the Regular Show episode "Terror Tales Of The Park II", Margaret tells a ghost story of how Mordecai, Rigby, Eileen, and herself joined a party bus, only to soon discover that everyone was rapidly aging to the point of turning to dust. The four try to escape but the bus driver laughs as he refuses to stop. They find a hatch on the roof to climb out of. As everyone jumps off the bus to freedom, they suddenly start de-aging into young adults, then teenagers, then children, then babies, then finally into nothing.
